Kevin Brockmeier's The Illumination Reviewed By Lavanya Karthik of Bookpleasures.com

Lavanya Karthik

Reviewer
Lavanya Karthik: Lavanya is from Mumbai, India and is a licensed
architect and consultant in environmental management. She lives in
Mumbai with her husband and six-year old daughter. She loves reading
and enjoys a diverse range of authors across genres.

Click Here To Purchase The Illumination: A NovelIn
Kevin Brockmeier’s new book, as stunning as it is disturbing, the
Illumination refers to an inexplicable phenomenon that overtakes the
world, where physical pain begins manifesting itself as a brilliant
light emanating from the wounds on everyone’s bodies. Overnight, the
world is awash in the dreadful beauty of lambent tumours and corroding
tissue, luminous ulcers and glimmering schoolyard scrapes."The
world had changed in the wake of the Illumination", Brockmeier writes.
"No one could disguise his pain anymore. You could hardly step out in
public without noticing the white blaze of someone’s impacted heel
showing through her slingbacks; and over there, hailing a taxi, a woman
with shimmering pressure marks where her pants cut into her gut; and
behind her, beneath the awning of the flower shop, a man lit all over in
the glory of leukemia.”How
would a world like this adapt to its newfound incandescence? Some turn
voyeurs, rushing to capture the art, the unmistakable beauty in
suffering. Hospitals evolve new triage rules; photography gains momentum
like never before. For others, like the teenaged ‘cutters’ , self
mutilation becomes an expression of angst, the inspiration for a whole
new sub culture . “We’re not creating wounds”, a character says after a
particularly grisly photo opp. “We’re uncovering the wounds that are
already there.” Some see variety in the light around them, and in some,
it inspires empathy. But for the most part, people just learn to look
away. “You would think “, a character observes, “that taking the pain
of very human being and making it so starkly visible – every drunken
headache and frayed cuticle, every punctured lung and bowel pocked with
cancer – would inspire waves of fellow feeling all over the world, at
least ripples of pity…”. Brockmeier
gives us a world ripe with potential, a scenario that surely demands
examination. Yet he prefers to breeze by this aspect of his tale,
choosing instead to focus on individual stories. So we follow the
trajectory of a

journal through the lives of six unconnected people as
they struggle to cope with their pain. The journal is a compilation of
love notes written by a man to his wife. "I love watching you sit at
your desk”, it reads. I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud
covered suns. I love how easily you cry when you are happy. I love your
many doomed attempts to give up caffeine. I love the way you shake your
head when you yawn. I love the way chocolate makes your eyes light up."It
is a litany of endearments made all the more poignant by her untimely
death, and it touches each of these six lives in different ways. For
data analyst Carol Ann, whose life “seemed like one long litany of
wounds”, it is the salve that helps her move on from a painful marriage
and divorce. For Jason Williford, author of those notes, it is his one
connection to the love he has lost, until his pain becomes his diversion
and, ultimately, his salvation. Ten year old Chuck Carter, victim of
bullying at home and in school, can see the pain in inanimate objects as
well, and the journal’s radiant pages spur him to become its protector.
For writer Nina Poggione, literally wounded by her words as she endures
oral ulcers through successive book readings, the journal inspires a
parable that leads her toward love and healing, however fleeting. And
for used book peddler Morse Strawbridge, “..fascinated, yet vexed by the
book”, the journal is a comforting presence, his sole companion in a
momentary respite from his impoverished life. “Between each sentence,
it seemed, there was a gap, a chasm, a whitening away of meaning. He did
not understand how something so sweet, so earnest and candid, could
also be so wayward and enigmatic. He kept expecting to return to the
book and discover that it had pondered all his questions while he was
gone and then fortified itself with the answers.” In a world lit up by
suffering, evangelist Ryan Shifrin is an anomaly – a man untouchedby
the Illumination, seemingly immune to disease and disaster. Bound to
his vocation not by faith but the burden of obligation, his life is
spent questioning God’s intent. Is the Illumination a sign of His love ,
in which case, he himself has been left bereft? Or is it a sign that
His love is decorative, a particularly arduous test of faith? The
journal resonates with a simple love he can never hope to feel, that he
has, in fact, deprived himself of, and that he can only yearn for in
“..a Heaven of starting over, a Heaven of trying again” .‘The
Illumination’ traverses terrain familiar to readers of Brockmeier’s
earlier work – alienation, silent heartbreak, grief. This is also a book
about the fleeting connections we make , or miss, the ephemeral
encounters that leave one’s life forever changed. It is one of those
books that you will either love or hate unconditionally, the kind that
will work its way under your skin and into a stubborn corner of your
head and stay there. There are times when Brockmeier’s chronicle of
suffering feels like a dark reflection of Jason’s words, an
unrelenting chronicle of damage and disfigurement – severed thumbs,
mouth ulcers, the aurora of a million ruined hearts, livers and
kidneys. His characters are offered little respite and certainly no
redemption. The section on Jason Williford is especially hard to read,
as we watch him apprentice himself to a teenaged cutter, learning how to
release his grief in the incandescence of his pain.And
yet, for all its bleakness, it is hard to remain unmoved by this book’s
raw and tragic beauty or Brockmeier’s considerable skills as a
storyteller.Click Here To Purchase The Illumination: A Novel